In 1979, Basu Chatterjee made Baaton Baaton Mein and unobtrusively brought to us the dating and courtship rituals of a community that was till then either caricatured or just overlooked in Hindi cinema. Nancy Perreira and Tony Braganza…
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Matriarchal manipulation in a patriarchal world is depicted unsparingly in Usha Priyamwada’s Pachpan Khambe Laal Deewarein (Now playing on Prasar Bharti). The mother resentful of her lecturer daughter’s comfortable life in her college residence because the younger daughters…
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“Start with hope..always start with hope. We went from being a shitty team to become one of the biggest dynasties in the sport and all it needed was one match to light this fire,” says Michael Jordan at…
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In 1947, my grandparents brought three children and the remains of an uprooted life from Pakistan to India in a train. One of those children was my mother. I grew up hearing a lot of stories about the…
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Three documentaries streaming right now show the ultimate culmination of the Bois Locker Room culture. And what happens when one gender is taught to mistrust its instincts of self-preservation and the other does not even learn something as…
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In Sudip Sharma’s Paatal Lok (Now streaming on Amazon. Co written by Sharma, Sagar Haveli, Hardik Mehta and Gunjit Chopra. Directed by Avinash Arun and Prosit Roy), India’s disowned inhabit the headlines we turn away from. A young…
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Dawn knocked on the door, bedecked in nine yards, vermillion and carrying an aluminium milk can. Kanku was her name. No morning was complete without the swirling of her rotund hips and middle, as she set her can on the ground and herself on her haunches. “A litre?” she would ask with a smile […]
They say there are five stages of grief. Seven maybe. Either way, I think I can say I’ve been through about four. Or am going through them – they’re going back and forth for me to be unable to pinpoint which stage I’m at, right now, at this very moment, yesterday – who knows? […]
Along the western border of Punjab where India ends and Pakistan begins (or the other way, depending upon which side you’re looking from), there lies a stretch of no man’s land, marked off by rusty barbed wire fencing. It hides the scar where a country was once cut into two. Overlooked by the bunkers of […]
Death used to a simple matter some years ago. People died. We gave away their belongings to needy people, framed a photograph and hung it up the wall, sometimes with a garland dangling around it. That was it. Perhaps a shirt or a saree was kept, in remembrance. A watch, probably a ring they wore.Which […]
When the sunrise was not something I took for granted and the sound of birds chirping in the morning made my day complete before it had even started. When soft guitar chords would float around me as I waited patiently for nightfall, as days stretched into night and then merged into each other like […]
A young cousin of mine got engaged today. An army officer’s daughter, she is getting married to an army officer too. Needless to say (wonder why I am saying it then…..but there it is), the event had a definite fauji flavour. The party was spread over three sections of a venue. The festivities in […]
Pic by Kunal Karan Kapoor Sometimes, the merest thing can trigger off memories- an image, a sound, the whiff of a perfume. I recently viewed a photograph of Mumbai….endless tall buildings, a grey snaking road and a bird soaring in the sky and there I was transported back to my favourite city. I was suddenly that bird…..free, […]
Bright yellow mangoes with their fragrance and juicy sweetness occupied most of little Pranay’s thoughts these days. Now, this was not an out of ordinary occurrence given that Pranay and his family were major mango fanatics. Year after year along with the summer heat a certain mango mania descended upon the Sharma household. *** Mummy […]
Memory is nothing but a compound a distillation an essence a coming together seeping together staying together of everything that the eyes drank the skin tasted the breath sang the soul heard and never forgot and that is why when breeze mixes with rain you suddenly smell pine needles and distant snow and damp roses […]
Sometimes I think of those people, who touched my life briefly and vanished when a current triggers a buried memory when a word, a song brings forth a face when I am traveling and have nothing to read I think of them and wonder where they are today and why we fell out of touch. […]
Yesterday, my doctor had advised me that I should not be at my computer for too long as it will only aggravate my cervical spondylitis. It was not something I could take lightly. The pain in my neck was indeed excruciating. However, my fingers kept itching all day to write. Restless and irritable, the entire […]
Have you pondered a sudden unexpected end? Nothing is unchanged. The clothes lie in the same wardrobe, those socks are in the dryer, the book they were reading is still lying with the bookmark on page 259. That shirt on the door smells of their perfume. But no person to turn the page, wear […]